A review and a meditation: John Doyle's 2006 production of "Company" and the 22nd Psalm

In 2006, John Doyle followed up on his cast-as-its-own-orchestra approach in "Sweeney Todd"with a production of "Company" using the same approach. I saw the production and wrote a review for friends. This post is both a review of the show and a memoir or mediation on "Being Alive, Bobby's last song. The song always reminds me of the anguish I felt after an ill fated two month stay at an Anglican seminary, Nashotah House, about thirty miles outside of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I left Nashotah House after two months, and leaving began a "dark night of the soul" period in my young life, which took several months to come out of and longer to understand its role in my life. 

I loved "Company," just like I thought I would, but not immediately. It took some time to engage fully my emotions.  Even by the end of the first act, I thought that I might be overall disappointed.  My expectations were so high that I thought I was going to feel let down.

The set is intriguing. It captures the spirit of the play and the heart and soul, or what's left of both, of the aging upper middle class Manhattan sophisticates who are Bobby's friends. It all glistens and gleams and sparkles and shines, from the black bare brick wall of the theater to the Plexiglas cubes arranged in seemingly haphazard order, to the black lacquered Steinway, instruments resting here and there as if in a special exhibit in a museum, and to the spic and span hard wood floor polished to a fine sheen and with an equally glistening inter-lay of beautiful tile with an eye catching dark blue hue.  A lone gleaming white fluted Corinthian column anchors the set. It's as shiny and sleek as the rest of the stage design.  It's base is a little offsetting, though. It's looks like a round radiator whose flat top serves as a table for cocktails, ashtrays, and as a rest for the hands, arms and backs of the performers.

The performances are all strong.  I think some of the reason why I wasn't immediately all agog is the central the conceit of the production.  As much as the idea is unique, innovative and works on several levels, having actors playing their own instruments demands sacrifices that have been mentioned in other reviews. 

I've seen "Company" several times.  The choreography can be lots of fun.  I've seen the women in Bobby's life confront him with the "You Could Drive a Person Crazy" number in a variety of exciting ways.  Here, although the song is delivered as well as I've ever seen it, there's not much you can do with your hands, feet, legs and body while playing instruments.  "Side By Side," which opens the second act, is choreographed as imaginatively as possible, I think, if all the actors are playing instruments while performing it.  For that reason alone, it doesn't disappoint.  However, with all its energy and drive, it, too, is a choreographer's dream.  It works better without the burden of instruments.

Lack of specifically designed spaces for the action bothered me just a little, too. Company is nowhere near as complex a show as "Sweeney Todd," but there were still some moments when people unfamiliar with the play might not know exactly where something is taking place. If Bobby's friends don't have homes, if Harry and Sarah aren't sparring around real furniture, for example, if Peter and Susan, and later, just Peter and Bobby, aren't on a terrace for the terrace scene, if Bobby doesn't have an apartment, if he and April aren't in his bedroom in bed for the "Barcelona" number, and if Martha is not outside all by herself on a park bench when she sings "Another Hundred People," then these scenes don't pack the same emotional wallop, at least for me, as they otherwise would.  Maybe I've just been spoiled by TV and film.  Had I grown up listening to the radio, I might have a more finely honed imagination, and all of that wouldn't bother me one bit.

On the other hand, and this has been said, too, the convention allows you to focus more attention on the book and the remarkably profound lyrics.  Some of the action, some of the dialog and even a lyric here and there, are dated- middle aged couples experimenting with marijuana, because it's the latest rage with the kids, "my service will explain," but, of course, the themes of the show are as relevant today as they ever were.  They are eternal, and Sondheim's take on them is so amazingly insightful and rings so profoundly true that you know why so many people who love the theater think that he's a god. I paid more attention to the dialog this time around than I had before.  It's very funny and insightful.  The songs and the lyrics are still the highlight, but the book is solid, too.  I like all the New Yorker jokes.  I didn't remember them from before, lines like "The pulse of New York City is the busy signal." and "I'm a New Yorker.  Nothing interests me."

Esparza plays it low key throughout.  He always keep a slight emotional distance. Bobby is supposed to be so good looking, so personable, so socially accessible and adept, so charming, and so charismatic that all these people can't help loving him to death.  Esparza's choice takes something away from all that.  But it makes his epiphany, his great catharsis, Being Alive, all the more powerful. I've never seen it performed any better. When he sits down at that Steinway, the first time he plays an instrument, I knew what was coming, and I expected a lot.  Esparza delivered in spades.  Dorothy Parker delivered that famous one liner review of an early Katherine Hepburn stage performance, "She ran the gamut of emotions from A to B.'' I don't know what the venomous wit would say about Esparza's "Being Alive," but his performance will forever remain for me the alpha and the omega of that song.  In part because until the moment he sits down at the piano, he's been so detached, but to a great extent because of his awe inspiring voice. He finds the whole truth and nothing but the truth in the song.  It's incredibly moving.

Christ quoted the opening line of Psalm 22 right before dying on the cross, "My God, My God, why has thou forsaken me?" That psalm has been called " a cry of anguish and a song of praise."  It has particular resonance for me, because the last time I walked the beautiful grounds of Nahshota House, I cried out to God in my despair, and He remained silent.  Nearly a year later, I wrote a paper about my experience at Nashota House for a remarkable professor who wanted us to finish our research paper at the last possible moment.  She said she didn't care if we were still writing when she walked into the class to collect them.  She wanted our last possible reflections on the topic, which she wanted us to explore not only intellectually but spiritually and personally, as well. 

Thirty years ago, I wrote on Spiritualism and my experience with it, my religious quest until that date, and, to personalize it, I wrote about my experience with seminary.  I didn't finish the paper in the classroom, but I did finish it after midnight on Sunday morning before the Monday it was due.  The paper was incredibly healing.  Putting my thoughts down "black on white" about leaving Nashota House, almost a year after it happened, made me understand for the first time what really was happening inside of me and why it happened . 

Synchronicities surrounding the paper were quite dramatic.  To close the paper, I wanted a quote from the Bible, one that would capture the utter despair I felt the day I took a final walk in the woods between two lakes and the elation I felt as all the pieces of the Nashotah House puzzle fell into place for the very first time.  I went over to a Bible, pick it up and opened it randomly to Psalm 22.  This "cry of anguish and song of praise" captured perfectly exactly what I felt when I left Nashotah and what I was feeling at that moment of ephiphany. 

The next day, for the first time since I left seminary, I attended church. I laughed and cried throughout the entire service.  It was the celebration of Pentecost, the decent of the Holy Spirit on the disciples.  I had no idea. I couldn't believe it.  The sermon was not an angry one at, all but it was about our arrogance before God. The priest even wove into the sermon my passion for language, referencing the Tower of Babel and calling it not just a myth for the evolution of foreign languages, but, more profoundly, a story about the creature's arrogance before the Creator.  Nashota was to a great extent about my arrogance. God had very little to do with my call to the priesthood.  Upsetting the church, stirring things all up, being the first openly gay priest, eventually finding one and then living with my spouse in the rectory, all of this and more was what I dreamed about doing in my ministry. My call was all about me. I thought I had the brains and charisma to put it all off, to revolutionize the church.

Ever since I first heard "Being Alive," I have wondered whether Sondheim was inspired by Psalm 22 both for the structure of the song and its central emotional dilemma.  From anguish to joy is what both the psalm and the song are all about.  I wouldn't be surprised at all if that psalm, so important to me personally, did inspire Sondheim, and if that's one of the reasons hearing it always moves me so deeply.

Raul Esparza in "Company"